Pre-treatment of suitable solid wastes for improved anaerobic digestion

The recent AMPC 2022 Decarbonisation Pathway Report, confirmed the status of decarbonisation in Australian red meat processing, and illustrated the most effective strategies & technologies needed to further decarbonise. Bioenergy was again found to be our sector's single largest decarbonisation enabler, with potential carrying capacity for over 27% of the sectoral decarbonisation task. AMPC's bioenergy program continues to grow, and in 2022 our sector's bioenergy use had increased from 4th to 3rd place in the most used energy sources (overtaking coal). However, more needs to be done. Despite innovative AMPC & RACE projects around the utilisation of off-site feed stocks for biogas productivity via new to industry co-digestion reactors, paunch and certain sludges remain the most prevalent on-site waste streams, They are also the most resistant to biogas productivity via traditional CAL's. That is why this project will trial a new to industry on-site pre-treatment processes for paunch and sludge prior to digestion in traditional CAL's . The on-site trial will look to validate and verify an alkaline pre-treatment process that may unlock potential for 60%-100% biogas productivity uplift for paunch and certain sludges. In addition, the industry AD Adviser tool developed by USQ will be updated so that results can be easily applied to an existing tool for AD design and adoption.